In modern computer systems, a non-trivial percentage of the total cost of ownership of a computer system corresponds to the amount of power it consumes. As an example, rack position cost for some equipment can comprise a substantial portion of the overall cost of the system; much of it is attributed to the cost of hardware necessary to distribute power to the racks and to provide cooling for the racks. In highly cost-optimized systems, such as archival storage systems, these power-related costs can be a significant percentage of the total cost of ownership of the systems, and an aggregate maximum power utilization across all racks generally determines the size and cost of the power distribution and cooling equipment for the facility. These hardware costs are often either shared equally among the racks for ease of accounting purposes or allocated proportionally, based on expected maximum power utilization. However, because power utilization varies widely based on various factors, such as hard disk drive activity and temperature, allocating hardware based on an average or expected maximum power utilization is an inefficient and uneconomical use of resources.